This is about rock piles and stone mound sites in New England. A balance is needed between keeping them secret and making them public. Also arrowheads, stone tools and other surface archaeology.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

I don't know

We've been talking in comments about these hollow piles and the ethics of disturbing them. Here, I found a couple of new structures mouldering away in the woods and I am wondering: isn't it best to just leave them alone entirely? It does eventually become sad walking around these graves.

From below:

Note the slightly lower centers of these smaller piles nearby:

I think the hollow pile is ubiquitous. Later in the same walk (you have to look carefully):

There is a small piece of quartz.These are from the same area of Dunklee Pond as before. Maybe I should go back in summer when it is not so gloomy.

Wow! I NEED to go out and find/look at them if only to recognize that debt of respect and contrition. I understand and feel strongly that they must be protected maybe that CT law (mentioned in another post) should be a national one. At least protection should be paramount amongst this community ....

Peter, Jeff, and all: toward the end of this work, it becomes clear that the more respect paid to Special Places, from all people, just not those Indigenous Most Likely Descendents but all people, the more powerful they themselves become.

Recognizing something as Sacred to someone, I just decided, is sort of like praying; here's that quote: "Including other tribes and religions over the years has changed the way Puvungna is viewed and used for sacred rituals. Rather than diminishing the original sanctity of the site, this inclusive process has actually enriched its spiritual significance. Diana Wilson, scholar of native California studies, writes of individuals who frequent sacred places like Puvungna that “[. . .] once they had visited the site to worship, it would become still more sacred to them, because, by worshipping there, they had connected with and blessed that land. Thus, a sacred place would become more sacred over time, as each use would strengthen its religious significance” (Wilson 4). Other declarations reflect similar sentiments. Cindi Alvitre, who spoke at the Scripps Humanities Institute this fall, is a Gabrielino/Tongva professor at Cal State University, Long Beach with a long-term investment in these ongoing preservation struggles. Alvitre writes of Puvungna’s sanctity: “People who come to our land ask us for our permission to be told of and worship at our sacred site and when they go there to worship, it becomes more sacred to them and to us, because of the power that praying over and on the land gives the land” (Alvitre 2). Jimi Castillo, Tongva leader, protester of the Puvungna development, and speaker at the Ancestor Walk, adds: “the more prayers that are said on and over a sacred place, the more sacred it becomes [. . .]” (Castillo 3). Many a prayer has been uttered over Puvungna’s soil, prayers that will change in form and practice as tradition continues to bend to the weight of new influences. The place is dynamic, forever reaching out towards new communities as well as its original inhabitants. The knowledge that this place is sacred runs bone deep; it is an ancestral knowledge, a knowledge that stems from what Louie Robles calls cellular memory. The fight to save Puvungna erupted into public uproar when, in 1993, officials at Cal State Long Beach fenced off the sacred site and tore down the organic garden. Many Acjachemen individuals had viewed the garden as sacred for its nourishing and lifegiving gifts; like the Eucalyptus trees at Bolsa Chica, the garden had been absorbed into the sanctity of the site. While the bulldozers belched their fumes, Lillian Robles and others held a vigil. Her protest efforts eventually coalesced into a larger movement, the Ancestors’ Walk. Louie reflects on his mother’s motivations. “She said it wasn’t right that we were losing our sites,” he tells me. “She thought, ‘how can I raise awareness?’ So she had a dream that she should go to these different sites and pray. She thought of all the [southern California] sites that were threatened or already developed.”

A Celebration of Ceremony Among the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen NationJulia Edith Rigby Scripps College 2012 (pages 72-4)

Peter, yesterday I suddenly "got' what you mean (I think) by "temporary nausee." I remember the sadness - the helplessness and hopelessness - I felt when that little stretch of my road was realigned in the summer of 2007. All the people I sought out to help save the cultural resource casually dissmissed by people who are legally bound to protect such things as unimportant.